Mrs. Sprague listened with woe-begone perplexity to these sounding periods, conscious only that her darling, her adored scapegrace, had suddenly turned serious, and was using the weapons she had so often employed to justify his conduct.  For it was using one of the standing arms in the maternal arsenal, to remind the wild and headstrong lad that his father had been Jackson’s confidant, that he had been Governor of Imperia, that he had enforced the demands of the United States upon European statesmen, that after a life spent in the public service he had died, reverenced by his party and by his neighbors.  Jack, as an infant, had been fondled by Webster, by Clay, and, one never-to-be-forgotten day, Jackson, the Scipio of the republic, had placed his brawny hand upon the infant’s head and declared that he would be “worthy of Jack Sprague, who was man enough to make two Kentuckians.”

“But you—­you, ought to be a colonel.  Your father was a major-general in the Mexican War at twenty-five.  A Sprague can’t be a private soldier!” she cried, seizing on this as the only tenable ground where she could begin the contest against the two children confederated against her.

“I don’t want to owe everything to my father.  This is a republic, mamma, and a man is, or ought to be, what he makes himself.  I saw in a paper, the other day, that the Government has more brigadiers and colonels and—­and—­officers than it knows what to do with.  I saw it stated that a stone thrown from Willard’s Hotel in Washington hit a dozen brigadiers.  I want to earn a commission before I assume it.  I’ll be an officer soon enough, no fear.  I could have had a lieutenant’s commission if I had gone in Blandon’s regiment.  But I hate Blandon.  He is one of those canting sneaks father detested, and I won’t serve under such cattle.”

Mrs. Sprague, like millions of mothers in those days, was cruelly divided in mind.  When the neighbors felicitated her on the valor and patriotism of Mr. Jack she was elated and fitfully reconciled.  When, in the long watches of the night, she reflected on the hardships, temptations, the dreadful companions her darling must be thrown with, country, lineage, everything faded into the dreadful reality that her darling was in peril, body and soul.  He was so like his father—­gay, impressionable, easily influenced—­he would be saint or sinner, just as his surroundings incited him.  This was the woe that ate the mother’s heart; this was the sorrow that clouded millions of homes when mothers saw their boys pranked out in the trappings of war.

Our jaunty Jack enjoyed the worship that came to him.  He was the first boy in blue that appeared in the sandy streets of Acredale.  Never had the rascal been so petted, so feted, so adored.  He might have been a pasha, had he been a Turk.  The promising down on his upper lip—­the object of his own secret solicitude and Olympia’s gibes during the junior year—­was quite worn away by